The Gospel Shatters Our Expectations

Orthodox priest and theologian David Bentley Hart writes in the most recent First Things (August /September 2013) about how we should look at Christian civilization in its historic glories, with its historic flaws, and considering its current "exhausted" state. The article is titled "No Enduring City" and while I don't agree with every one of his judgments, the conclusion is luminous:

So perhaps the best moral sense Christians can make of the story of Christendom now, from the special vantage of its aftermath, is to recall that the Gospel was never bound to the historical fate of any political or social order, but always claimed to enjoy a transcendence of all times and places. Perhaps its presence in human history should always be shatteringly angelic: It announces, even over against one’s most cherished expectations of the present or the future, a truth that breaks in upon history, ever and again, always changing or even destroying the former things in order to make all things new. That being so, surely modern Christians should find some joy in being forced to remember that they are citizens of a Kingdom not of this world, that here they have no enduring city, and that they are called to live as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.